First we load the SPIAT library.

library(SPIAT)

Here we present some quality control steps implemented in SPIAT to check for the quality of phenotyping, help detect uneven staining, and other potential technical artefacts.

In this vignette we will use an inForm data file that’s already been formatted for SPIAT with format_image_to_spe(), which we can load with data(). We will use define_celltypes() to define the cells with certain combinations of markers.

data("simulated_image")

# define cell types
formatted_image <- define_celltypes(
    simulated_image, 
    categories = c("Tumour_marker","Immune_marker1,Immune_marker2", 
                   "Immune_marker1,Immune_marker3", 
                   "Immune_marker1,Immune_marker2,Immune_marker4", "OTHER"), 
    category_colname = "Phenotype", 
    names = c("Tumour", "Immune1", "Immune2", "Immune3", "Others"),
    new_colname = "Cell.Type")

1 Visualise marker levels

1.1 Boxplots of marker intensities

Phenotyping of cells can be verified comparing marker intensities of cells labelled positive and negative for a marker. Cells positive for a marker should have high levels of the marker. An unclear separation of marker intensities between positive and negative cells would suggest phenotypes have not been accurately assigned. We can use marker_intensity_boxplot() to produce a boxplot for cells phenotyped as being positive or negative for a marker.

marker_intensity_boxplot(formatted_image, "Immune_marker1")

Note that if phenotypes were obtained from software that uses machine learning to determine positive cells, which generally also take into account properties such as cell shape, nucleus size etc., rather than a strict threshold, some negative cells will have high marker intensities, and vice versa. In general, a limited overlap of whiskers or outlier points is tolerated and expected. However, overlapping boxplots suggests unreliable phenotyping.

1.2 Scatter plots of marker levels

Uneven marker staining or high background intensity can be identified with plot_cell_marker_levels(). This produces a scatter plot of the intensity of a marker in each cell. This should be relatively even across the image and all phenotyped cells. Cells that were not phenotyped as being positive for the particular marker are excluded.

plot_cell_marker_levels(formatted_image, "Immune_marker1")